Locus Energy offers active monitoring and clarity fleet analysis

Locus Energy announced the launch of a comprehensive, low-cost monitoring, analytics, and fleet management solution for residential solar sites. The offerings, Active Monitoring and Clarity Fleet Analysis, separate out addressable issues, such as capacity losses, from non-addressable issues, such as shading and snow losses, in order to increase system uptime and reduce maintenance costs.

Locus currently monitors more than 5 GW of solar capacity across more than 130,000 sites and hundreds of different device types globally, with flexible, highly reliable data acquisition services. Leveraging Locus’ expertise as the leading independent residential solar monitoring firm, the new offering ensures that residential sites are well-serviced and performing to expectations.

Michael Herzig, CEO said, “We are very excited to bring these new offerings to market and have invested a lot in our tools to enable remote assessment of system under performance. This new solution helps us deliver peace-of-mind to our customers about the performance of every system that has been deployed.”

PV systems are designed to last for at least 20 years, typically requiring little maintenance; however, this does not mean that issues do not arise. From experience monitoring tens of thousands of sites for nearly 10 years, Locus has observed a 15-20 per cent failure rate for PV sites each year. This means that an average site is likely to encounter at least one serious problem over five years and multiple serious problems over its lifetime.

Complicating this, PV system issues can be difficult to spot, with shading, snow, and soiling impacting performance, but not generally able to be addressed cost-effectively by often-expensive maintenance.

Solar Performance Loss

Graph: Overall loss estimates across the largest US regions

With Active Monitoring and Clarity Fleet Analysis, the company continuously assesses fleet performance, employing patent-pending analytic tools to identify potential issues and diagnose the root causes of alerts, such as shading, soiling, snow, and degradation. Locus then works with field service companies to file service tickets and track issues to resolution.